This is not quite right. Secret key crypto will be fine if quantum computing becomes ubiquitous (or if we find out that P=BQP), but P=NP is a vastly more powerful result, to the extent that it would shatter secret key crypto as well. P=NP means that you can pluck answers to a question out of the aether with no more difficulty than checking if one random input answers the question. So if you know how to calculate "lambda key: ciphertext.decrypt(AES, key).matches(English)", then by P=NP magic you already know the list of all 256-bit AES keys that satisfy that calculation. (Substitute "English" for any human language or binary file format you prefer.) You would still have the problem of sorting through all the candidate plaintexts, but if the ciphertext is longer than 256 bits then the list of candidates will be very short. Only one time pads (key length equals plaintext length) would remain truly safe if P=NP, because an n-bit ciphertext could represent any possible n-bit plaintext, i.e. the P=NP magic doesn't teach you anything you didn't already know.

If anything it's the other way around: a firewall is designed for security, whereas NAT is designed for functionality. For instance, all but the cheapest NATs inspect packets and automatically open holes to the LAN for compatibility with FTP, IRC DCC, various IM protocols, etc.

Yes, we are. As a white US resident, I've never had to worry about selecting a wardrobe that carefully avoids any chance of being mistaken for a criminal (e.g. avoiding hoodies, no matter how convenient they are); and as a male, I've never had to make an on-the-spot calculation of whether or not the guy entering the elevator is going to use the confined space to sexually harass me or bully me into accepting a sexual proposition.

Only in rare cases does privilege come with a special handshake -- it's often the mere absence of bias. In the context of discrimination, "privilege" is a term of technical jargon; I strongly recommend you read Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege for a good explanation of what "privilege" means here.

TCP has already been replumbed numerous times since its creation. Take a look at the after-market congestion avoidance algorithms that have been bolted on, or new wire-level features like timestamps (now ~mandatory), window scaling (now ~mandatory), SACK, and ECN. If AQM takes off, it'll simply be the latest in a line of fixes that's kept TCP working across 37 years of Moore's Law.

No, the car gets you to a parking spot. In a big city (e.g. I live in SF), that could still be a few blocks away from your destination.

"People of the book" specifically means Abrahamic religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and arguably offshoots like Baha'i. The "book" is the Torah, a.k.a. the first 5 books of what Christians call the Old Testament. The Islam founding legend says Muhammed was visited by an angel who told him "yup, everything the Jews believe is true, but here's some more stuff God forgot to tell the Jewish prophets".

Today's hatred and mistrust between Jews and Muslims... well, Israel/Europe/US and Muslims... is fairly recent; Muslims and Mizrahi Jews living in modern-day Israel got along reasonably well until the 20th century kicked over the anthill. The modern insanity is almost entirely due to ham-handed mismanagement of the Palestinian Mandate after the Ottoman Empire fell in WWI: first by Britain, whose administration was rotten enough that it triggered an armed Arab revolt and made the WWII Allies locally quite unpopular, then after Britain handed off the festering mess in the aftermath of WWII, the UN made it worse as they promptly decided to forcibly segregate the Palestinian Mandate's population into "Jews" and "not Jews", i.e. the "Trail of Tears" approach (instead of e.g. setting up a one-state secular constitutional democracy with a liberal immigration policy for Jewish diaspora). The Middle East would probably not be a powder keg today if WWI had gone just a little differently and, say, the Ottoman Empire had lingered on until after the Holocaust.

Google's privacy policy says they won't sell your information to third parties, and their stated business model is all about throwing algorithms at big piles of aggregated data and never having a human look at any of it. Do you really think humans at Google even have the desire to look at your data, nevermind the access to do it without getting fired on the spot? What is your threat model? What abuse are you defending against?

So don't use those. Unlike the old IE lockin, it's pretty obvious from the "-webkit-*" prefix that they're Webkit-specific. We aren't going to raise a new generation of web developers who think that "-webkit-*" properties are standard CSS and it's those other non-Webkit browsers who are being weird and icky for not implementing a "-webkit-*" property correctly. (Ditto "-moz-*" for that matter.)

This is a good point, one that I nearly brought up in my original post. I was in a similar boat, due to Asperger's as much as to the obvious reason.

Please note that "sodomy" means radically different things in different states. For example, in most states it includes oral sex.

Romney edges Santorum in conservatives' straw poll

Gingrich plunges, Santorum surges

I believe you mean lube and feces. Blood is not normally a product of anal sex if you're using lube right, and there shouldn't be any semen in the mix because the condom should catch it. (And you are using the condom because, monogamous or not, you don't want to catch an unpleasant E. coli UTI.)

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It [definition of marriage] [i]s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It [definition of marriage] is one thing. -- Rick Santorum

Santorum is essentially saying "Here are some things that are not marriage: homosexuality, man on child, man on dog". He is putting homosexuality in the same list as pedophilia and bestality so that the three may be compared with each other as fellow examples of the same category. His "That's not to pick on homosexuality" simply means "homosexuality is not the only thing in this category, it's just an easy example because homosexuality is more common than the other category members"; at best that phrasing only barely implies that Santorum thinks pedophilia and bestiality are as bad or worse than homosexuality.

The law keeps it rare by scaring people away from doing it, and also prevents the people who do it anyway from bragging about it and normalizing it. Do you really think that repealing the law would have zero effect on the rate of, say, stepfather/stepdaughter molestation?

You can criticize me for drinking the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong kool-aid, but I am NOT a Rand fan and never have been. (I'm a leftist for one.)

Besides, Rand's fiction was totally in favor of coercive relationships, right up to the edge of rape. How much was Rand's principles and how much was Rand getting her jollies and forgetting the rule "don't publish your Mary Sue wankfic", who knows...